Quotes by Scientists - Page 15

Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of their relation to it.

Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as ‘enlightenment.

If you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun.

Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.

ASTRO-GYMNASTICSGo on a starlit night, stand on your head,leave your feet dangling outwards into space,and let the starry firmament you treadbe, for the moment, your elected base.Feel Earth's colossal weight of ice and granite,of molten magma, water, iron, and lead;and briefly hold this strangely solid planetbalanced upon your strangely solid head.

Your body will argue that there is no justifiable reason to continue. Your only recourse is to call on your spirit, which fortunately functions independently of logic.

Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.

There is no higher or purer pleasure than to sit with closed eyes and hear a naturally expressive voice recite... a play of Shakespeare's.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.

Hope is a good breakfast but it is a bad supper.

Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.

Nothing is more highly to be prized than the value of each day

PRAYER to the sun above the clouds.Sun that givest all things birth,shine on everything on earth!If that's too much to demand,shine at least on this our land.If even that's too much for thee,shine at any rate on me.

Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?

We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

I would live to study not study to live.

The virtue of prosperity is temperance the virtue of adversity is fortitude.

Some dream and dream but their dreams remain dreams...

The efficacy of TA-65 is incremental. It does seem to stop telomere shortening and minutely lengthen telomeres, but not in the profound way that future drugs will. One natural compound that may prove more powerful and more affordable may be available by the time this book is published. You can find updates on it (not allowed to give a link) Still, TA-65 us currently being used by the authors of this book, and Dr. Woynarowski is one of the physicians who is licensed to distribute it.

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers we outgrow acquaintances libraries principles etc. at times before they're worn out and times-and this is the worst of all-before we have new ones.

There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.

Indeed neither life nor science bothers about "essences"-they leave "essences" to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science.

We one and all of us have an instinct to pray and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.

The health of an enlightened and progressive society is measured by how vibrant is its science fiction, since that is where true self-critique and appraisal and hope lie.

We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself; it never cheapens or debases him who reaches for it but ennobles and honors him.

Nothing is terrible except fear itself.

Once your baby tree is in the ground, check it daily, because the first three years are critical. Remember that you are your tree's only friend in a hostile world.

Life without death simply isn't life, but death

All the best secrets are told at night.

There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature.Philosophy, law and ethics, to be effective in a dynamic world must be dynamic; they must be made vital enough to keep pace with the progress of life and science. In recent civilization ethics, because controlled by theology and law, which are static, could not duly influence the dynamic, revolutionary progress of technic and the steadily changing conditions of life; and so we witness a tremendous downfall of morals in politics and business. Life progresses faster than our ideas, and so medieval ideas, methods and judgments are constantly applied to the conditions and problems of modern life. This discrepancy between facts and ideas is greatly responsible for the dividing of modern society into different warring classes, which do not understand each other. Medieval legalism and medieval morals- the basis of the old social structure-being by their nature conservative, reactionary, opposed to change, and thus becoming more and more unable to support the mighty social burden of the modern world, must be adjudged responsible in a large measure for the circumstances which made the World War inevitable.

The one prejudice it had proved hardest to root out of a society was the one towards people whose social skills were limited.

I'm a good liar. A great one. And to be a great liar you have to live your lies, to believe them, to the point that when you tell them to yourself enough times, even what's right before your eyes will bend itself to the falsehood.

Where God's grace takes you, grace will increase your capability and your capacity. Grace will empower you.

Everything is hard before it is easy

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Only air and light and the love of friends! Let no man lose heart who still has these.

In the past few women have tried and even fewer have succeeded.

If the whole world I once could seeOn free soil stand, with the people freeThen to the moment might I say,Linger awhile. . .so fair thou art.

Anything in the world can be endured, except a series of wonderful days.

Better a long ignoble life of shallow pleasures than a short stab at heroism, ending with a short stab. And just because one man plays another doesn’t always mean that it’s not the right direction for both of them.

Music is either sacred or profane. What is sacred accords completely with its nobility, and this is where music most immediately influences life; such influence remains unchanged at all times and in every epoch. Profane music should be altogether cheerful.Music of a kind that mixes the sacred with the profane is godless and shoddy music wich goes in for expressing feeble, wretched, deplorable feelings, and is just insipid. For it is not serious enough to be sacred and it lacks the chief quality of the opposite kind: cheerfulness.

If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life.The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.

Running ain't no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction.

Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Purslane. I could taste and feel her other lovers and she could taste and feel mine, each experience reaching away like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, diminishing into a kind of carnal background radiation, a sea of sensuous experience. I had been a girl once, then a thousand men and women and all their lovers. The stasis field locked on. The Synchromesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.- "House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds

If a man looks sharply and attentively he shall see fortune for though she be blind yet she is not invisible.

There are several important remarks which can be made about this 'absolute emptiness' and 'absolute nothingness'. First of all, we now know, theoretically and empirically, that such a thing does not exist. There may be more or less of something, but never an unlimited 'perfect vacuum'. In the second place, our nervous make-up, being in accord with experience, is such that 'absolute emptiness' requires 'outside walls'. The question at once arises, is the world 'finite' or 'infinite'? If we say 'finite', it has to have outside walls, and then the question arises: What is 'behind the walls'? If we say it is 'infinite', the problem of the psychological 'walls' is not eliminated. and we still have the semantic need for walls, and then ask what is beyond the walls. So we see the such a world suspended in some sort of an 'absolute void' represents a nature against human nature, and so we had to invent something supernatural to account for such assumed nature against human nature. In the third place, and this remark is the most fundamental of all, because a symbol must stand for something to be a symbol at all, 'absolute nothingness' cannot be objective and cannot be symbolized at all. This ends the argument, as all we may say about it is neither true nor false, but non-sense. We can make noises, but say nothing about the external world. It is easy to see that 'absolute nothingness' is a label for a semantic disturbance, for verbal objectification, for a pathological state inside our skin, for a fancy, but not a symbol, for a something which has objective existence outside our skin.

It is right that we should stand by and act on our principles; but not right to hold them in obstinate blindness, or retain them when proved to be erroneous.

I took especially great pleasure in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its arguments.

God knows I often retire to my bed wishing (at times even hoping) that I might never wake up; and in the morning I open my eyes, see the sun once again, and am miserable.

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The Sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus

One of the most lasting pleasures you can experience is the feeling that comes over you when you genuinely forgive an enemy - whether he knows it or not.

Don’t reject something just because it seems strange. It’s comfort that will kill you in the end.

All the crimes on earth do not destroy so many of the human race nor alienate so much property as drunkenness.

It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen so are all innovations which are the births of time.

Intelligent design theorists have learned a few lessons from the failures of their predecessors and have devised a more sophisticated strategy to compete head on with evolution. One of the main things they [intelligent design creationists] have learned is what not to say. A major element of their strategy is to advance a form of creation that not only omits any explicit mention of Genesis but is also usually vague, if not mute, about any of the specific claims about the nature of Creation, the separate ancestry of humans and apes, the explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophic global flood, or the age of the earth - items that readily identified young-earth creationism as a thinly disguised biblical literalism.